Methodologies and challenges of teaching Spanish as a foreign language to immigrant students with linguistic handicap in the Spanish educational system

Abstract

Immigrant students who join the Spanish educational system face many dif-ficulties, but the most difficult one is to carry out this incorporation without knowing the school's vehicular language. Therefore, it is essential that these students learn Spanish as soon as possible, so that they can understand the teachers' explanations or communicate with their classmates and teachers. However, the adoption of the language and culture of the host country should not replace those of the students' source ones, as they are also important for the development of their identity. Hence, this study aims, firstly, to analyze the teachers' attitudes about the adaptation of their teaching methodologies to the culture and the source language and secondly, to check what teaching methodologies are carried out in the welcome classrooms (for learning Spanish as a foreign language) and in the reference classroom. In order to achieve these objectives, all the teachers (201) in the region of Murcia who teach the students in the welcome classrooms were surveyed. Some of the results, on the one hand, revealed that not much importance is given to the source language and culture of the immigrant students in class and, on the other hand, that curricular adaptations are made to the characteristics of these students.